Davenport Public Library's Reference Blog

Tag: real life

Sunshine Mackenzie is living her best life – a hugely popular YouTube cooking star, she has published several cookbooks and is about to get her own television show. She has a beautiful home, a loving husband and millions of fans on the verge of mega-stardom.

And then she gets hacked.

In a single day she loses her reputation, her home, her fortune and her husband when someone hacks into her Twitter account and starts revealing secrets that start showing the cracks in Sunshine’s perfect facade. She and her team scramble to contain the damage but it’s too late, the truth is out there and the media is eager to expose every lie and blemish. Finally, with nowhere else to go, she must return to her hometown and her estranged sister and confront what she has become and where she came from.

Hello, Sunshine by Laura Dave examines living authentic in an inauthentic age. Even us ordinary people present a carefully crafted image of ourselves and our lives through the many social media platforms that are so prevalent now. I know for myself, I only post beautiful photos of my garden or my cat doing something cute, not the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Does that make our lives any less authentic? Is what we post “real life”, or just a facade? It’s an interesting debate to consider and Hello, Sunshine raises lots of interesting questions. Well worth a read.

Are you ever curious what people are actually reading? If you’re like me, you see all the books that people are checking out from the library or are buying at bookstores and you wonder if they are really reading those books or not. I know that most of the books that I check out just sit on my shelf until I either return them to put another hold on them or I renew them for another 3 weeks of book shelf sitting. It’s a little frustrating.

While I was poking around on the internet one night before bed, I found CoverSpy. CoverSpy is a Tumblr put together by people roaming around New York looking for people reading. These ‘agents’, as they call themselves, wander into bars, parks, subways, and streets to take note of the cover of the books being read and what the person reading looks like. They also have groups in Vancouver, BC, Omaha, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Montreal, Barcelona, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC that do the same.

CoverSpy caught my interest because instead of posting pictures of the people reading, which vaguely creeps me out because it makes me super self-conscious when I read in public, CoverSpy just posts the cover and a little description of the person reading. And it’s not just books adults are reading! It’s coloring books, kid’s books, cookbooks, how-to manuals, etc. Anything that looks like a book or that could be counted as reading material (BESIDES e-readers and magazines) count!

Each post is set up like the one above. I love scrolling through the list because the description of the person reading can get pretty funny.

This website veers away from traditional book recommendation sites that pull their source information from librarians or book reviewers. Instead CoverSpy pulls anonymously from people who are actually out reading in public. If you don’t find your next read on these site, no big deal. At least you were entertained and maybe laughed a bit.

Hello There!

The Info Cafe is the blog of the Davenport (Iowa) Public Library reference department. We love connecting people with books (and movies and information) so if you love books (or movies or information) you've found your tribe!